Miller: Time to take Stanford, seriously

Aug. 28, 2013

Updated 7:00 a.m.

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Stanford coach David Shaw holds the trophy for his team winning last season's Rose Bowl. The Cardinal will be focused on returning to Pasadena, but perhaps this time it will be to play in the BCS Championship. HARRY HOW, GETTY IMAGES

Stanford coach David Shaw holds the trophy for his team winning last season's Rose Bowl. The Cardinal will be focused on returning to Pasadena, but perhaps this time it will be to play in the BCS Championship. HARRY HOW, GETTY IMAGES

The team is ranked No. 4 in both major polls and just climbed onto the cover of Sports Illustrated, the magazine declaring Stanford to be the smart pick to unseat No. 1 Alabama and end the SEC’s seven-year string of national championships.

Finally, perhaps, it has happened. The Cardinal has a football team worthy of its marching band.

For years, the most entertaining part of the Stanford football experience wasn’t experiencing Stanford football at all.

It instead was witnessing the potential car wreck that is the school’s marching band, anxiously anticipating the latest eye-diverting, cringe-inducing, authority-tweaking routine the bunch had concocted.

The Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band is easily the most disciplined in the country. They’ve been suspended numerous times.

But now, after three consecutive seasons of BCS-busting and with a fourth apparently on the way, the Cardinal certainly is being taken seriously, even as someone dressed as a tree dances manically nearby.

“We haven’t changed one bit,” Coach David Shaw said. “People are giving us some praise, and I think that’s great. We appreciate it. But it can’t ever affect our preparation. It can’t affect how we play on game day. It can’t affect our approach to how we play.”

So, we’re taking them seriously, but they aren’t taking us seriously. Smart move, but then what else would be expected from a school like Stanford, where the term “student-athlete” can still be used without the usual accompanying wink.

There’s no reason to have a lot of faith in these preseason polls because, let’s face it, the rankings are assembled using mostly nothing but faith.

These are the ultimate educated guesses, particularly entering a season in which one potentially prominent team still isn’t sure if its reigning Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback will be permitted to play.

And even then, who really knows? With Johnny Manziel, we’ve all learned to hold our applause until all the headlines are in.

Preseason predictions? Yeah, good luck with those. A year ago at this time, no one was touting Manziel for the Heisman. Absolutely no one. Not even the people at Texas A&M, where Manziel wasn’t named starter until mid-August.

The most popular pick back then was Matt Barkley, and that prediction turned out to be woeful when viewed as a post-diction.

“The noise from the outside doesn’t change what we do,” said Cardinal safety Jordan Richards, and is there a better word to describe preseason chatter than noise? “It’s just getting back into the groove of things and everyday working on something.”

Last year, the preseason No. 4 in both polls was Oklahoma. The Sooners eventually lost three games, including the Cotton Bowl by four touchdowns, and ended up No. 15.

So, even as the hype looks good on the school’s Web site, the forecasts sound good on the national talk shows and that SI cover felt good to Shaw (the coach said he liked the story inside, too, even though he admitted he hadn’t actually read it yet) none of this means anything if Stanford doesn’t continue to roll.

“We’re not going to play any harder or any less hard because people say we’re going to be good or people say we’re going to be terrible,” Shaw said. “So we appreciate it and we thank people for the recognition and the respect of our program, but at the same time …”

He then talked about how the hype can’t affect the way the Cardinal prepares and, since you already read that sentiment from Shaw above, there’s no point in having him repeat the words again here.

We will say this much about Stanford: For a program that traditionally hasn’t had to deal with a lot of expectation, the Cardinal is strangely well-versed at downplaying the hype.

But there is no dismissing the fact that the school sold out its season tickets – 33,000 total, a Stanford record. That’s something that had never happened before.

The Cardinal was 1-11 as recently as 2006. But the program turned after Jim Harbaugh took over, and Shaw has continued the resurgence.

Stanford was 35 victories over the past three seasons. So does Alabama. The Cardinal has won 5 of 6 against USC and beat UCLA twice in one week in November.

“While it’s nice to have a favorable ranking, that’s something that the media and fans pay attention to much more than us,” senior linebacker Trent Murphy said. “We are only looking forward to our season opener against San Jose State and will continue to take things week by week, one game at a time. We control our own destiny.”

See, well-versed. And well-armed, cliché-wise.

The preseason talk will end soon enough, replaced by in-season action. That’s when Stanford’s football team could really blow away the school’s band and send that dancing tree screaming into the night.

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